


The Long Road

by encore



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angels, Crossroads Deals & Demons, M/M, Mutual Pining, Road Trips, Sheith Secret Santa 2018, Supernatural AU - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 08:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17158901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/encore/pseuds/encore
Summary: When Shiro disappears, a divine power helps Keith find him again.Shiro, meanwhile, regrets pretty much everything.





	The Long Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ribbitsplace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ribbitsplace/gifts).



> My piece for ribbitsplace over on twitter, for the 2018 Sheith Secret Santa. They ended up spending more time apart in this fic than I originally intended, but I tried to work in their mutual pining to make up for that. I hope you like it!
> 
> I wasn't able to find a beta, so any spelling and/or grammar mistakes are my own, but I went over it a few times so hopefully I caught everything.

Shiro visited his family’s graves first. It was an atmospheric night, sunset cresting the hill behind the small graveyard and allowing the granite markers to cast long shadows. The air was chilly enough that Shiro could see his own breath with each exhale so he pushed his plum scarf up higher as he respectfully kept down the worn dirt path instead of crossing between graves. A useless platitude, really, considering what he had come for. He kneeled by his mother’s simple plaque, pulled out some cleaner and hoped this all balanced out in the end.

Shiro hadn’t even been sure it would work, at the time. He only pushed on with a sense of detached determination to the last chance at a long life, spurred by the neatly creased paper tucked into his coat pocket. He scrubbed the plaques down gently, ridded them of dust and a few animal droppings before he finally pulled out a jar and dug a handful of dirt up. The ground had been firmer than it would have had he waited for warmer weather, but time was something he’d never really had in the first place. He packed the jar halfway, flexing his numb, dirty fingers and murmuring one last apology as he left.

So the first item had been easy enough. It was the second item that was the hardest.

He had debated for a while how to go about obtaining the bone of a black cat. He didn’t want to actually go out and hurt some innocent animal for it if he didn’t have to. Though he doubted it would be easy to just walk around some alleys until he found a dead stray and inconspicuously take what he needed. (Even thinking about the specifics was gross. Couldn’t it just have been a chicken bone, something he could pop by the local KFC for?) Locating an occult shop was his best bet, even if he felt like a creep opening an incognito tab and jotting down directions from google maps.

The first shop was a bust that ended with the woman behind the counter firmly telling him to leave. The second shop he tried was shadier, luckily, and he left with a velvet pouch tucked discreetly at the bottom of his messenger bag.

The third piece was the easiest, which is why Shiro had saved it for last.

All he needed was a picture of himself, so he printed a copy of a candid that Adam had taken of him last year, mouth open mid-sentence and a water bottle in hand. He tried not to think about Adam, now, of how he would react to this. Things had been strained for months before the breakup. Shiro doesn’t want to do this for anyone else, but part of him wonders if this could have fixed things, if he even _wanted_ it to fix things. A few months ago Shiro would have said yes, of course he did, but now… It wasn’t something he wanted to think about, just another piece of guilt stacked on to his conscious.

With all three pieces placed carefully in an old Adidas shoe box, he’d set off to a crossroad with the full worrying weight of dread dragging at his heels - dread for it to work or not, he wasn’t sure.

He really should have just left it all alone.

 

…

 

Keith hadn’t heard from Shiro in two weeks. From what the general consensus seemed to be, no one had. During the first week, Keith shrugged it off. While he wasn’t the type to stay glued to his phone, Shiro liked sending him little updates throughout the day -- how his volunteer work was going, or some video clip of otters. But they were both busy people, so it wasn’t far-fetched to assume Shiro just got busy. Maybe he needed some space. Keith, of all people, could respect that.

A week turned to two and everything came to a head when Pidge shot out an arm to grab Keith as he tried to walk past the front desk of their gym and demanded, “Where’s Shiro?”

“What?”

“What do you mean ‘what’?” Pidge let Keith’s arm drop. She looked tired; dark bags bloomed under her eyes, shoulders tensed, and the telltale shake of one coffee too many showed in her bouncing leg. None of that was really far from her usual, though. “He hasn’t been in since the Friday before last. It’s Wednesday. That’s almost two whole weeks, Keith.”

“He didn’t call in?”

“No,” she stressed slowly, like he should have already jumped on to her train of thought by now. “If he did then I would know, Keith.”

“Did you try calling him?” Pidge didn’t look impressed, so he follows it with, “Okay. I’ll look into it.”

Keith left work that night and immediately sent two texts to Shiro. After thirty minutes he sent another and let the phone sit on the bathroom counter while he showered. When he stepped out and swiped a thumb over the humid screen to see there was still no response he called and left a voicemail, short and to the point. _Where are you? Call me back, please._

Which all led to him waking up the next morning and immediately heading to Shiro’s apartment, worry etched in the corner of his lips and pinched brows. He knocked twice and got no answer, so he took a breath and looked down.

Keith stared down the cartoonish depiction of a dog in a cowboy hat gaily welcoming guests inside with a determination not unlike a man collecting life debts. He edged the mat up higher with the toe of his boot so he could pinch the corner between his fingers and look under for the key he half hoped wouldn’t be there. Luckily for his purpose, but unluckily for his patience, it was there. Keith picked the key up, making a mental note to chew Shiro out when he finds him for not moving the spare key from the most obvious spot. When, not if. Keith refused to accept the alternatives, and it was this easy determination that let him break into his best friend’s apartment with less guilt and more annoyance.

The apartment was far from the dark, trashed scene Keith had been sculpting in his head. The window in the living room didn’t have any blinds and let the morning light fill up the space easily enough. Shiro kept his place fairly minimalist and rigidly organized. There was no TV in the living room, there was only a navy blue suede couch, a glass coffee table, and a small side table that hosted his favorite, overly large house plant. Keith took a step further inside and let the door fall closed behind him.

The coffee table had a thin book to one side and an unlit, half-burned candle in the middle but nothing really important. When he leaned around to inspect the side table the soil of the spiderplant looked dry, the spindly leaves seeming to droop more than usual. The open kitchen was clean enough, but as he got closer he could see a single spoon in the sink with a coffee stain pooling in its dip. The fruit bowl was hosting two grossly brown bananas and a cantaloupe that he could see mold climbing up the side of.

It was profoundly obvious that Shiro hadn’t been here for a while.

Keith put a hand on the counter.

What could have happened? Did Shiro run away? He would have said something to Keith though, wouldn’t he? Did he get kidnapped?

What could Keith do? Finish scoping the apartment, first. Maybe Shiro had taken or left something that could give some insight into the situation. Maybe he’d been waiting for Keith to realize something had happened sooner, and that thought weighed him heavy with guilt he would need to compartmentalize. His stomach clenched, and the hairs on his neck raised.

He made it a half step into a turn when a real physical weight slammed into his back, driving the edge of the counter into his gut and briefly knocking the wind out of him. Keith fumbled for his belt, tried to pry his fingers around the handle of the athame he inherited from his mother, but his left arm was pinned between his body and the counter and his assailant was quicker. A thick arm wrapped around his neck, jerking him bodily backward before slamming him into the fridge.

Keith bucked and kicked back from the fridge and successfully managed to free his arm. The man growling behind him wrapped his hand around his arm and tightened the hold on his neck as Keith clawed at his forearms.

Suddenly the weight was ripped from his back and he could breathe again. There was a bone-rattling scream as Keith took a gulp of air that tasted like sulfur. A gentle hand rested on his shoulder and he whipped around, finally able to pull out his athame and brandish it high in one hand while the other hovered over the tender skin of his throat.

“Please,” she said, stepping back and raising an arm in a placating motion. Keith didn’t budge. There was a man -- a demons vessel, Keith recognized as he took in the acrid smell of the room and the circle of dark ash surrounding the body -- laid face down on the ground by their feet. “Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help.”

She did save him, but. Keith wasn’t stupid, and two strangers following him into a missing persons apartment? Seemed too coincidental. Was she a hunter? Another threat? “Help with what?”

“Shirogane made a deal with a demon. A crossroad demon, specifically, which -- you don’t have to pretend,” she rushed to add. A hunter, then. “I know all about these things, Keith.”

“How do you know my name? Who are you?”

“My name is Allura. I am a paladin of Heaven, and I was tasked with guarding Shiro. Please,” she spread her hands invitingly. She was annoyingly relaxed for a woman facing a knife-wielding stranger. “I believe you can help me find him.”

A paladin of Heaven?

Oh.

An angel. Definitely, definitely not a hunter.

In the midst of Shiro’s hollowed apartment, an angel was asking a witch’s son for help. He felt like he was in the setup for some bad joke, and not just because angels were a group he had never personally encountered, despite the company his more private line of work tended to keep.

The angel was six foot tall and dressed in a long pink coat over a white dress that looked more like a nightgown than anything. Her loose silver hair cascaded down her back and curled around her cheeks, framing her light eyes and dark skin. She was deceptively slim, because the strength she had lifted the other man with did not match her appearance.

“Okay,” he said, slowly. “Let's find Shiro.”

The angel smiled, something dazzling and perfect that immediately put Keith back on edge. “Let’s.”

 

...

 

Shiro found out about the concept of crossroads demons like this: Keith, with his idiosyncrasies, would never claim to be a superstitious or spiritual person. Which hardly stopped him from owning more occult books and paraphernalia than any normal twenty-one-year-old needs.

“I inherited them,” he had explained, quietly, which made Shiro feel guilty enough to stop prodding that particular wound. It didn’t, however, make Shiro feel guilty enough to _not_ rip a page out of a book and tuck it in his waistband. In his defense, the page had already been barely clinging to the binding. Keith wouldn’t miss one page, right?

Besides, it wasn’t real. It was just...interesting. He could photocopy it and put the page back, pass it off as naturally falling out of its binding. Which wouldn’t be too hard to believe.

Since he was diagnosed Shiro had tried all sorts of things; religion, herbal remedies, the litany of experimental medications and physical therapy. Temporary advancements, but nothing that really cured him. His electro therapy helped the most, and he kept up a rigorous diet and physical regime. As is, his muscles had a couple of years left at peak condition.

And that was something he just didn’t want to think about.

Shiro had been over at Keith’s, both having the night off from their gym. Keith was telling him about a particularly obnoxious man that had recently hired him as a personal trainer, hands gesturing close to his body in frustration. He was sitting perched on his plain coffee table, one foot tucked in front of him and one resting on the ground, dressed in loose, red sweatpants and a dark tank top. Shiro had been messing with the bookshelf across the room in an attempt to not get distracted by how Keith’s thick hair fell from his sad, adorable attempt at a top knot.

Keith received a phone call mid-vent and gave it a stern look before he mouthed _sorry_ and left the room. Shiro was curious but didn’t ask, instead deciding to put the book he’d been messing with back up when a loose page caught his eye. It was hanging out farther than the rest, so he’d opened the book properly to push it back in place when the grayscale image taking up a full page arrested his attention: a woman wreathed in shadows, holding out a sharp hand. The page beside it was full of tiny, curling text. His eyes caught on _desires_ and _exchange_ and his hand was reaching up to gently pry it from the scant inch of binding it still clinged to before he could think to stop.

 

The first few days after meeting the demon - Haggar, she had called herself - had been great. Amazing, even.

But then it was like a switch flipped, and suddenly everything was going wrong. He had clients drop him left and right, almost totaled his car, and people he didn’t know kept following him. He brushed the latter off as some uncharacteristic paranoia borne from the anxiety over his recent dealings with local devils, but things just kept happening.

It took a literal demon manifesting in his bathroom, smelling like fire and monologuing about coming to collect for Haggar, to make Shiro decide enough was enough and he needed to go _,_ now.

 

…

 

Keith had been fully prepared to jump on his motorcycle and set off with just the clothes on his back. He had his athame and his wallet, he didn’t really need anything else, did he? But Allura had taken one look at the bike and put her foot down.

“We’re taking my car,” she said. Which is how Keith found himself in the passenger seat of a baby blue Prius with a map spread over his lap to keep track of where they had been. It wasn’t entirely necessary to have a physical map, but Keith had always learned better with something more physical than he did on datapads. Shiro never turned off the location on his iphone, so they decided to start there and see what happens.

Keith could admit it was a better idea to have a car in this situation but Allura was, in his opinion, an annoyingly safe driver. All his attempts at taking over were quickly shot down, however.

“Oh no,” she protested, arching one eyebrow derisively. “I know how you drive. I’ve been in this vessel for years and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

“For the record,” Keith snapped back. “I think it’s very creepy.”

“I’m,” Allura started defensively. Her thin eyebrows pinched in genuine confusion. “I’m not creepy. I’m his guardian. I’m here to help him.”

“Well, you’re not doing a very good job then, are you?”

“I was called away. I didn’t think...it was for a few days, he should have been fine. The closest thing to a problem I’ve had with Shiro is you.”

 _Excuse me?_ The stress Allura put into _you_ is familiar in a way that had Keith instantly grind his teeth. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Allura looked at him sideways, with pity that melted the annoyance off her face. “Keith, I can sense it. I know you’re not human.”

“That’s--” True, sort of, but what of it? She wasn’t human either. He was human enough for it not to matter.

“Or not entirely human. When I realized you were a hunter too it was a shock, I’ll admit, but...you seem to have overcome your nature. So you weren’t a threat.”

He knew there was prejudice about his heritage, but still. What the fuck? “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Surely you knew that your mother was…”

“I know my mother was a witch.”

“Oh,” an expression crossed Allura’s face that Keith couldn’t quite read, but it amped up his already defensive state. “Keith—”

“I think we should just focus on finding Shiro,” he said flatly, turning back to the map and hovering his marker over the highway line they were currently on. From the corner of his eyes he could see Allura start to say something, but she apparently decided against it and turned her full attention back to the road.

 

...

 

There’s something to the phrase _absence makes the heart grow fonder_ , Shiro could admit, because every mile put between Keith and himself had him feel a phantom rope tug around his heart, begging him to turn around.

Keith was his best friend. They clicked from their first meeting, and while it started with Shiro taking the new guy under his wing in some faux mentorship, the script quickly flipped and leveled out. Shiro taught Keith how to properly write up his lesson plans, so Keith showed him how to patch up his own clothes when he snagged his shirt on the sharp edge of a machine. Keith saw Shiro bringing in prepacked store lunches so he taught him how to cook and prepare breakfast tacos without completely burning the eggs, leading Shiro to teach Keith how to properly pack a suitcase when he complained about having to make a trip out of town. Keith let Shiro watch him hotwire two hoverbikes in his uncle’s autoshop so Shiro took him out on the desert to show him how to jump off cliffs and not die.

It was fun. It was easy. Keith had the edge of a competitor, someone always looking for a challenge to conquer, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it.  Shiro already enjoyed his work, but having Keith there to run into from time to time definitely didn’t hurt his enthusiasm.

Shiro cut his eyes to the mass of shadows that scuttled about the other side of the motel room and tried to focus on the escalating situations he found himself in and not the chances he had already self-sabotaged.

“Tell me again,” he demanded. The shadows stopped scuttling, instead twisting on themselves in a way he found difficult to describe. Unsettling, mostly. It buzzed constantly, sounding like a wall of cockroaches, and chirped like something with a beak. It was the thing that saved him from the demon Haggar had sent, and it had been the one helping him dodge her since.

“Again!” It screeched, slapping it’s topmost set of foggy hands on the mattress and hoisting itself up. Shiro wasn’t sure how exactly its physiology worked, or why it existed in the first place. “I’ve already told you. In 89.2 percent of realities, the demon known as Haggar will manipulate you in her favor, and in 81.5 percent of _those_ realities, they are for nefarious purposes. In this reality, her gaining your soul and body is _catastrophically_ bad, because you did what only 9.42 percent of yourselves did in similar realities: made a stupid deal with the devil!”

“She wasn’t _the_ devil,” he protested. Semantically, she was a demon, not Lucifer.

“No, she’s worse than the devil! Haggar always manipulates a deal to her favor. She has had years upon years to perfect it, and usually you would just be left to deal with the consequences,” the shadow drops back down. “But in this reality you are a very important piece in a larger game. Like many others…”

“But why?”

“Who knows! But you were chosen for Michael, and I don’t want to be the one to tell him Haggar picked you off before you could be used!” Shiro didn’t want to be used by anyone, and he was about to say so, before it popped back up over the bed holding a beaten bible. “Now: you need to do as I say if you want us to remain in the 12.38 percent of similar realities wherein we win this.”

 

...

 

They had a few false starts.

First, following Shiro's phone had led to a dead end three cities over. But it gave them a start, at least, and Keith had pocketed the scuffed, dying phone just incase. It wouldn’t have worked at all if Shiro had left it there when he first took off, so they weren’t as far behind as they could have been.

In one town, Keith walked into the wrong gas station and got caught in a turf war between a coven of vampires and a pack of werewolves. They took his athame and Allura only barely found him in time, before the werewolves figured out he wasn’t a new addition to the local coven and would prove useless as bait. At a highway rest-stop Allura got accosted by a couple of fairies drawn in by her aura who, loudly, offered to deal with Keith and whisk her away. She politely declined. A kitsune at a bar offered some information about a man that passed through that could have been Shiro, but that thread of investigation led to them setting a barn on fire and leaving town with no real ground gained.

They were on the highway again at three in the morning and Keith was driving because he finally got Allura to agree on a more efficient system of switching. He wasn’t a bad driver - far from it, honestly, just prone to speeding and a bit of justified road rage. There was no lights, only a sliver of the waxing moon and the metal of road signs reflecting off their headlights.

“Keith,” Allura’s voice was quiet but attention-grabbing, chin rested on her hand as she stared at the vague shapes that sped past the window. They passed a sign marking the next town as eleven miles away. “I want to apologize.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have judged you so harshly. Even asking for your help…,” she trailed off, and Keith resolutely kept his eyes on the road and not her face. “I doubted you, and I am ashamed of myself for that. You don’t have to forgive me. But it’s clear that you care about Shiro, and,”

“And?”

“And you deserve to know.”

“Know what?” She had been withholding more information about Shiro, and Keith had to stomp down on the anger that flared up at the thought that she could be keeping something important from him, keeping him from finding Shiro. “Allura, what are you talking about?”

“Shiro was chosen for something sacred, something I was supposed to make sure he was ready for, but,” she bit her lip. “I--”

A deer burst from the side of the road and barreled in front of them, successfully cutting Allura off. Keith cursed and hit the brake, hands gripped tightly to fight the instinct to jerk the wheel so as to not send them careening into a tree.

The deer zagged and safely disappeared into the dark woods.

“Jesus!” Keith peeled his fingers off the wheel slowly and looked over. Allura had one hand gripping the roof handle and one thrown out towards Keith, hovering over his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he said, after a pause. “You?”

“I’m fine.” She dropped her hands “Let’s...let’s stop at the next town for the night.”

They weren’t that far, based on the sign from a few minutes earlier. Keith wasn’t tired, wasn’t ready to quit, was prepared to drive as long as he was able and pass it over to Allura, but. “Okay, yeah. If you finish telling me what you were talking about when we get there.”

They checked in to a motel that, in juxtaposition with the general atmosphere of their quest, was moderately well light and clean. There was a worryingly large stain on the fold-out couch’s bed but Keith just flips the mattress and drops down on the starchy sheets. He laid there, stretched out on his back and resting his hands on his sheathed athame on top of his stomach. In the morning they’d do a cursory look around, and likely be on the road again by the afternoon. Constant travel wasn’t something entirely foreign to Keith, and he even enjoyed it. The worry for Shiro kept him from relaxing, though, and the guilt -- the thought of Shiro --

He had to be okay. There had to be a clue, somewhere. Keith would save him. He promised himself that, the moment he’d broke into Shiro’s apartment.

“You’ll protect him, no matter what, won’t you?” Allura’s voice broke through his thoughts.

“I will,” he confirmed easily.

“He’s a vessel, Keith.” He heard her moving on the one motel bed, straightening the creases out on the thin comforter.

Keith pondered that for a moment. “Like you?”

“No,” she said. “I am an angel, and the owner of my current body is a vessel. She was chosen, and given a choice, and she accepted.”

Keith turned his head just enough to watch Allura from the corner of his eyes. “So you killed her.”

“No!” She shot up, expression pleading. “She’s alive, she’s still here. Her soul is just suppressed, for now, and she has the option to cast me out or come to the surface whenever she wishes. I would respect her choice to do so.”

“Okay,” he conceded, mind jumping. “What does that have to do with Shiro?”

“Because once Shiro says yes he won’t have that choice. And the events that will take place should he be called on,” she bit her lip, looking genuinely distressed. She paused, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again Keith could see why angels were considered warriors in the set of her shoulders and determination in her eyes. “Michael wants to bring his petty, personal grudge with Lucifer to the Earth and I won’t allow it. He would set Lucifer loose himself just to find a new playing ground for their spats, and I don’t want this world to suffer for it. So please, Keith. Protect Shiro.”

 

They split up and spend the morning walking around the small town, meeting up at a diner for breakfast around ten. Their combined efforts showed nothing, and Keith resigned himself to marking this off as another failed town.

“That’s strange, isn’t it?” Allura whispered, almost to herself, looking off in the distance. Keith considered ignoring it, idly ripping the fat parts off his bacon and popping them in his mouth. He was in a bad mood, thoughts running through his mind at light speed, frustrated at the whole situation.

“What is?” He asked anyway, because the town did have him on edge, but he attributed that more to the frustration of failure than anything else. “No one’s seen anything.”

“No,” she raised an arm and made a small gesture to the playground across the street. “There’s only one child outside. It’s the middle of summer.”

“So?”

Allura frowns. “I think we should stay a little longer.”

“What?” Keith unfolded his arms. “Allura!”

“Trust me,” she turned back to look at Keith as she reached out for her cup of tea. “I have a feeling about this, Keith. We should stay.”

 

...

 

Shiro had come to a very crucial and rigorously tested opinion in the last month: he fucking hated the supernatural. Life was so much easier without all of this shit.

“Shirogane! Are you listening to me?”

For what felt like the thousandth time, Shiro pinched the bridge of his nose to fight an oncoming headache and asked, “What, Slav?”

“I said,” the furious little ball of shadows snapped, curling around his shoulders and buzzing unsettlingly. Shiro was mostly used to it by now. “Make sure you buy the red lighter, not the black one. And especially not the purple one, or the pink one.” Slav paused. “Or the gray one.”

“Okay, okay,” Shiro mumbled his acquiescence, dropping a pack of rubber bands into the basket hanging off his arm. No one could see or hear the shadow-being if it didn’t want them to, but he hated talking to it in public anyway. “I’ll get the red ones.”

“One red one,” Slav stressed. “Absolutely do not get a multipack. Or the one with the glittery pizza! Do you want us all to die?”

Shiro still didn’t know what Slav was, exactly, besides the world's most cruel choice at a guardian...thing. He hated to be ungrateful, but after a week moving from town to town, switching clothes and hopping over cracks in tiles at Slav’s insistence, Shiro half wished Haggar would just find him already and end it.

The little town they were currently stopped in was pretty nice, honestly. Quiet, friendly, open to a strange man rolling in with his offers of a vague backstory and psychic work. Slav was, surprisingly, a very accurate teller of the future, even if he seemed helplessly neurotic and confusing. He circled around the clients and screeched out probabilities at Shiro that he had to translate into something more mystic. It was how Shiro kept himself moving, and why he was checking out at the little dollar store so he could go burn some sage over an old lady’s home. Her young adopted granddaughter had got sick, she said, and she wanted the area cleansed since the girl lived with her.

It was a small thing to do, and not always the most effective - things like that required multiple, consistent applications, drawn out over a long period of time. But it would help put her mind at ease, and often the placebo of someone thinking they had genuine magic protecting them worked just fine by itself.

It was with small thoughts like this that Shiro missed Keith the most. Just shopping, something domestic, sure, but also the casual way the supernatural was integrating into his worldview. Enough that he had started to recall certain things about Keith that put his literal humanity into question. (All those books —?)

Even if Keith was non-human, it was too late to turn back now that he had seemingly abandoned him without a care.

“Something is very wrong in this town,” Slav had said when they arrived. Shiro believed him, keeping it in mind on every street he walked down and every shop he entered, but nothing so far had really happened. He gave it another day or so before they’d head out, crushing the desperate thought of turning around and heading back home as he dropped his change in the donation box on the way out of the store.

 

...

 

A shtriga. There was a shtriga in this town.

Keith couldn’t dismiss this kind of creature like he could others; this beast fed off children’s souls, sucking their life force out and leaving destroyed lives in their wake. Kids that were preyed on ended up in what functionally appeared to be comas, if they weren’t lucky enough to die first. If they killed it, some kids might wake up again, but -- they’d remember.

Allura mapped out the town, sending Keith off to consecrate their weapon. It had to be iron, and his mother’s athame would work perfectly, the curved dark blade set in a more traditional hilt. Allura had reservations about using a witch’s blade for something like this - technically, a shtriga was a type of witch. Warped and bloodthirsty, near-immortal, but still. Keith told her it was already consecrated, once when his mother made it and once when it came into his possession, but she told him to do it again just to be safe. He rolled his eyes but set out to find some salt and candles regardless.

They met up in front of the hospital around five, determined and grim.

“We will head into the children’s ward. Everything is centralized around the hospital, and it’s where the most vulnerable children will already be.”

Allura handled talking their way into the hospital, Keith standing stoically aside as she wrote their fake names onto the visitor's tags. Keith slapped “Steven” on his chest and only barely resisted the urge to pick at it the thin paper with his fingernails.

The halls were the same harsh, blinding white as every other hospital he had ever been in. He hated hospitals.

After a few minutes of navigating the halls and displaying their visitor's tags to passing orderlies, they arrived at the children’s ward. They bypassed the larger rooms, following Allura’s divine intuition farther down the hall until the approached a room that had a wide window in the wall, blinds half open. A man was bent over a cot, long light hair resting on his back in a loose, low ponytail. Keith couldn’t see what he was doing. He had one hand propped on the railing and the way his head moved he seemed to be talking, nodding his head.

“Excuse me,” Allura said as they stepped into the room, but when the man straightened up and turned around, she went silent.

“Oh, hello.” His voice was smooth and deeper than Keith expected. He seemed gentle and welcoming despite his height, which made sense for someone that worked with kids, but his eyes were cold. “Are you...visiting?”

Keith slanted his eyes towards Allura, waiting for her to take over, but she stayed silent.

Keith stepped up. “Let’s talk.”

The young doctors face betrayed no reaction, but his eyes watched Keith too closely. He smiled. “Of course. If you would follow me, please?”

 

…

 

Shiro had finished purifying the house relatively quickly. He had enough sage in his bag to go over it twice, too, since the house was pretty small.

“Oh, thank you so much, young man,” the old woman clasped her hands around his, not reacting to the feel of his prosthetic. “I’d have you do this to her hospital room, too, but they won’t let us burn anything in there. This will have to be enough for if she…”

“Go to the hospital,” Shiro looked at Slav from the corner of his eye, perched on a windowsill with his many shadow limbs pressed to the glass. He’d been strangely quiet since they came to this house, avoiding being close to either Shiro or the woman. “Think of a reason to go.”

“I,” he started before he could actually think up a reason. “I could do something else for her. Your granddaughter.”

The old woman looked surprised, clenching his hands tighter.

“I can make a charm. It won’t take long.” Shiro smiled reassuringly. “Just take me to her.”

 

...

 

“Oh,” the man looked exaggeratedly offended by the accusation. Keith, against his own preference, had been handling the would-be delicate attempt at broaching the subject normally left to Allura, who was still remaining quiet. “You think I’m a shtriga? Heavens, no. I want that disgusting creature gone as much as you do. Perhaps more.”

Allura, finally, seemed to snap out of her stupor. “Sincline!”

What?

The doctor - Sincline? - blinked slowly. “I prefer Lotor, now, Allura.”

“I should have known, bringing something so vile, I could feel a familiar energy, but, you—”

“I told you, this was not me,” he held his hands up placatingly. “I promise you. I’m almost positive I know who is behind this. Things have changed since you’ve left Heaven, Allura.”

Keith stepped in before Allura could throw herself at _whoever_ this man was.  She seemed incensed by his non-sequitur, eyes narrowing when he brought up Heaven. “Can we focus? If you’re not behind this, which I still don’t believe,” Keith said evenly. “Then tell us who is.”

“Lucifer’s witch, most likely. She has been obsessed with making me return, but I have no interest in their petty squabbles.” Allura squeezed Keith’s shoulders, no longer trying to move around him but staring at Lotor with alarming intensity.

“Explain. Now.”

 

…

 

The children’s ward made Shiro feel sad and trapped. He’d been here, like them, multiple times as a child, holding a stuffed dolphin while his grandparents tried to explain _muscle deterioration_ and _peak years_ in a way a nine-year-old would understand. He pushed past that feeling, that ache in his gut, by filling it with determination to help instead.

Slav chattering away in his ear helped with that, but not really in a good way.

“You ate eggs this morning, yes? Not waffles. Shiro,” Slav did a circle around his shoulders. “Was your fork on the left side of your plate or the right?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well!”

“This is the room,” the old woman stopped in front of them, giving him an out in having to hear whatever statistic Slav would have listed. Shiro smiled at her, pulling at the strap of his bag.

The room was small. The girl had been allowed a single, and she looked so small and peaceful sleeping on the bed that Shiro wanted to cry. There was no guarantee that this girl would ever wake up again, and normally he would never try to give this false hope to someone, but Slav insisted. Currently, Slav dropped from his shoulders and walked back out of the room. Shiro wanted to ask where he was going, but he couldn’t do that without being obvious. It would give him a half hour of quiet, at least.

The woman shut the door behind them and closed the blinds. Shiro opened the flap on his bag and pulled out a bundle of sticks and string. “Alright,” he said, putting as much confidence and assurance into his voice as he could. “This won’t take long, just--”

“That won’t be necessary, dearie.”

Shiro froze and before he could turn he felt the full weight of the woman crash into his back and send him into the side table.

 

…

 

Keith sat bouncing his leg in a plush chair while Allura and Lotor stared each other down in the otherwise empty office room. The room was decorated in warm, comforting colors and there was a board on one wall that had children’s scribbled artwork pinned to it. It made Keith feel like he was back in an orphanage, and he couldn’t even make himself focus on what they were saying, mind buzzing. The topic was big, sure, but he’d been on edge since they stopped in this town, and every moment stuck in the claustrophobic hospital made him want to scream. None of this was helping him find Shiro. For all he knew, Shiro could be lying on a hospital bed somewhere else, or in a ditch, or dead.

“Hey!”

Keith’s head popped up at the annoyed yell, swinging towards the closed door. Allura and Lotor glanced at him but didn’t seem to react to the yell. There was a faint scratching sound at the door, like a dog begging to be let in. Keith narrowed his eyes.

“Are you alright?” Allura asked.

“Open the door!” The new voice demanded, and Keith got up. He paused at the door, reaching out for any negative energy, but he didn’t feel anything malicious. If it was, Allura - and maybe Lotor, who was an angel, or maybe a demon, or both, Keith was having a hard time keeping up with the discussion, but it was something suitably dramatic - would have sensed it before him, anyway. He pushed open the door and a shadow darted in.

“You!” It snapped at him, rushing across the room then back again and launching itself at Keith’s legs. Allura had jumped up from her seat and Lotor leaned forward in interest. “Come with me, now!”

“What?”

Lotor finally stood up. “That’s--”

“Come with me now if you want to help Shiro!” The shadow buzzed angrily, sounding like a rattled beehive. Before anyone could say anything else Keith had already bolted out the door after the shadow.

 

...

 

Shiro didn’t have time to appreciate his own stupidity in falling for this creature’s front - that house was so sterile, she’d been acting just a little off, he should have--!

She had an inhumanly strong hand holding down one arm, the other wrapped around his throat, claws digging shallow marks in his skin that burned with the ash trailing behind them. Shiro had been expecting the sting of fangs in the meat of his neck but none came. He felt weak, though, the breath of the creature strangely cold on his skin. He felt tired. He couldn’t force his limbs to move. It would be so easy to sleep, now, and all his worries would be gone.

Distantly, he heard someone scream his name. It sounded like Keith. Shiro smiled, and let the cold darkness take him, hoping to slip into a dream where he could already hear Keith calling for him.

 

...

 

The sun was setting. Shiro had been patched up by Lotor before he’d left to see to all his newly awakened patients. While he’d been disinfecting the claw marks, Lotor had given him the rundown of what happened after he passed out - what a Shtriga was, how it fed off souls, how it was drawn by his unusually bright soul since it normally preyed only on children, how it could only be killed when it was feeding on someone, and Keith had plunged his knife in deep before ripping it off Shiro. Allura had announced she would be returning to heaven to have words with some other angels, Slav looping around her shoulders (much to her displeasure). “If you two need me,” she assured him, pushing him towards the parking lot where Keith had disappeared to. “Just pray.”

But for now...

Keith was sitting on the hood of the Prius, scuffed boots leaving faint marks up the front and Shiro knew enough about the neighbor-that-was-actually-an-angel to know there would be words about that later, but for now Shiro just climbed up beside him. Shiro had no idea what to open with, what he could possibly say, but he feels like he should say something so when Keith turns towards him he blurted out, “You saved me.”

Keith smiled. “Shiro.”

“You followed me,” he continued. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know that. I didn’t do it out of a sense of duty, or something,” Keith said. “But...this was my fault.”

“No,” Shiro said firmly. “Keith, this was my fault. I fucked up. I shouldn’t have made that deal, I shouldn’t have stolen from you, I shouldn’t have run off and said nothing in a stupid bid to protect you…”

“Shiro--”

“I’m sorry, Keith.”

Keith watched him, face pinched up in a way that made Shiro want to reach over and smooth it out with this thumb, and his mouth. He seemed to come to a decision, face smoothing out as he unhooked his arms from around his legs. “I forgive you. On one condition,”

Shiro’s breath caught. “Anything.”

“Don’t run away again. No matter what,” Keith turned his body towards Shiro. “Angels, demons, whatever. Just let me help you. Okay?”

“Of course.” Shiro smiled, and Keith turned softer,

“It’s good to have you back.”

Shiro laughed and moved to rest a hand on Keith’s shoulder, faltering at the last moment and stretching it out to wrap around him fully instead. “It’s good to be back.”

Keith leaned in gently and bit his lip to keep from smiling too broadly. The warmth from Shiro and the setting sun made him feel like he had caught on fire, fingers twitching by Shiro’s thigh. This was something he’d be willing to fight for, again and again.

**Author's Note:**

> A few things that I didn't really have the time or space to fit in: 
> 
> Keith's mother was a demon, not a witch, but he wasn't aware of that. She's alive, but she can't get to Earth right now.
> 
> Haggar was an angel, but she fell when she followed Zarkon (Lucifer being his title, here) in a rebellion. Lotor is her son but he wants nothing to do with Hell. 
> 
> Alfor has the title of Michael. Allura's annoyance with him might seem OOC, but in this AU their relationship ended up a lot different because he didn't die, and his real battle had already been fought.
> 
> The Michael-vessel and Lucifer-vessel thing isn't quite as apocalyptic in this AU; it's less about balance and more about Alfor and Zarkon just wanting to throw down anywhere anytime. Keith isn't going to let that happen to Shiro's body without a fight.
> 
> Haggar was going to actually show up but she had other ideas, apparently.


End file.
